Many moons ago when I worked in high end hi-fi our shop was used for a blind listening test between the variety of formats available at the time (early 1990’s). We had an eclectic mixture of musicians, producers, journalists, engineers, etc. over to listen to the same source music played through top of the range hardware, and the playback methods were rated individually and then collated. The formats were vinyl (probably a Roksan Xerxes with a Koetsu cartridge, I can’t recall exactly), a CD transport / DAC combo, miniDisc, Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and HDCD. There may even have been a Nakamichi CR7 or Dragon cassette deck…
From memory the event was set up by Sony, presumably to showcase their latest format (MiniDisc) and demonstrate how good it was. I recall an engineer explaining how good the MiniDisc format was, but, as these things go, the Philips DCC won the contest overall. Who here still uses their DCC player?
😜
As I’ve noted before, the quality of the source recording and engineering is paramount, and there are many other factors that come into play, such as room set-up. Pre 1974 vinyl sounds way better than anything manufactured up until recently - this refers to vinyl, I’m not getting into a analogue / digital argument
🙄. Of course, with lossless and all the other streaming formats sound quality is generally superb these days with only minor differences between brands and formats.
And here’s a pic of a prerecorded MiniDisc - as I’ve never owned a player it just gathers dust, I can just stream the LP now.
